You can also mod the game, which can let you unlock items and progress faster in single-player.

I got it at launch and I love it, but it is not a game I am trying to finish, rather a place a visit now and then.

I played it before as a grinding game but you can easily play it as a casual game. There's not really a defined playstyle for nms.

The missions from what I remember give you enough guidance on how to play. You essentially use your explorer tools (scanner, mining tool, combat weapons) to gather resources and explore the universe. Missions are there to guide you and give you things to do but you could just ignore most of them lol.

There's aspects that are geared towards grinding like exotic ships, mine construction, sector economy, etc. but they don't matter for casual players.

When they run an expedition it's got a good set of quests to follow and usually accelerated progress from the rewards. There's a new one with this update, not sure if it's live yet.

There is no direction to go, it's a sandbox, and discovery and exploration is pretty much the whole meat of the game. If you don't like that, this is probably not the game for you. There are random events, there are questlines that eventually happen which you can optionally pursue, some of which get pretty in-your-face in case you're worried you might miss them. Crafting and base-building is simplistic and mediocre. "Survival" is almost trivial on all but the very hardest difficulty settings, and even at the hardest difficulty and with willing suspension of disbelief it's not really a fulfilling part of the game. There are a variety of other meta-systems tacked on too like language-learning, ship customization, fleet management and missions, settlements, universe-hopping, etc but these are just addons, they're not the core of the game.

If you want a more "guided" experience you could try watching for some of the time-limited/seasonal expeditions they do as live-service events. Some of them are easier to follow than others, but they all sort of have a theme and usually give you a good workout in a variety of the game's different systems.

I would wait until their next "event" that they have after every update. That will give you kind of a hand holdy "tutorial" to bring you up to speed with the core mechanics, along with a direction to go. Plus during these events you can find lots of other players with cheaty bases you can quickly farm to get all the materials/credits you need with minimal grinding.

when last did you play it?

I played it while high earlier this year and managed to kinda figure it out because the tutorials were helpful enough

granted

I just wanted to build shit and kill shit, so I picked one of the easier game mode options

I think you can sidestep the more difficult survival/crafting mechanics if you want

that's if my memory holds up

I might have been playing donkey kong or some shit